Why Every GTM Leader You Hire Fails in the Same Way

The VP of Sales lasted seven months. The head of growth made it to fourteen. The replacements did about the same. By the time the company raised its Series B, it had cycled through three sales leaders and two growth leaders—and the pipeline problem hadn’t changed.

If you’ve been in B2B SaaS long enough, that story isn’t surprising. It’s Tuesday. And the explanations are always the same: the growth leader couldn’t get CEO alignment. The sales leader missed quota. Positioning was muddled. Or the more generous version: there’s such a thing as being the right leader for a certain stage, and the skills that got the company from Point A to Point B aren’t the skills that get it from B to C. Different stages demand different people.

I’ve spent twenty years on the growth side of the fence—including roles at companies later acquired by Amazon and AOL—and for a long time, I accepted those explanations. Then I started paying attention to what was happening on the other side of the fence. The sales leaders were churning even faster. The VP of Sales would cycle out, the next one would inherit the same pipeline challenges, and within a year, the pattern would repeat. Same conversations, same frustrations, same outcome. Two different functions, same curve.

That’s when the individual explanations stopped making sense to me. These weren’t just talent problems or fit problems. The pattern was structural. And it looked a lot like a physics problem.

If you look at it that way—as a problem of mass, velocity, and measurable distance—something useful happens. You stop blaming the pilot and start reading the instrument panel. You stop swapping out the head of growth and the head of sales as if they were interchangeable parts, and start asking whether the system itself can support the outcomes you’re expecting. Most importantly, you open a path to something that’s been in chronically short supply between GTM leaders and the rest of the management team: trust.

The Data Everyone Cites—and the Data Nobody Has

On the growth side, the most rigorous data comes from Spencer Stuart’s annual CMO Tenure Study, which has tracked the role for nearly twenty years. Their 2023 findings: Fortune 500 CMO average tenure is 4.2 years, slightly below the 4.6-year C-suite average. At the top 100 U.S. advertisers, it drops to 3.1 years—the lowest since 2009. Three out of four CMOs at those top advertisers were holding the position for the first time.

On the sales side, the data is even more stark. Bravado’s research finds that the average first VP of Sales at a Series A SaaS startup is just seven months. The typical company cycles through three VPs of Sales in the first eighteen months. Seven months. That’s barely enough time to complete a full sales cycle at most B2B companies, let alone build a repeatable process.

These numbers have been picked apart from every angle. Growth Brew, Growth Week, MIT Sloan, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, and GTM Magazine have all taken a crack at explaining the pattern. The explanations range from CEO misalignment to sales conflict to the argument that short tenure isn’t always a failure signal—sometimes it’s a sign of promotion or role evolution.

All of this work is worth reading. But it shares a common frame: it treats tenure as a function of the person—their skills, their alignment ability, their stage-appropriateness—or as a function of organizational dynamics between functions.

What pushed me past those explanations was what I kept seeing from the growth side: the sales leader next to me was living the same story. Same structural constraints, same unrealistic timelines, same outcome—just faster, because they were closer to the revenue number. Two different functions, same curve. If this were really about individual talent or stage-fit, you’d expect more variation between the two roles. Instead, they move in lockstep. That points to something deeper than the people in the seats.

The Cross-Functional Data That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Spencer Stuart covers Fortune 500 companies and top advertisers. Bravado covers early-stage sales hires. Nobody has published a comprehensive, cross-functional view of GTM leader tenure by company funding stage. That’s a significant blind spot.

The table below is my estimate, triangulated from the enterprise data, anecdotal startup observations, and the Bravado VP Sales data. I’ve included confidence levels because I’d rather be transparent about what’s estimated than present a clean chart that overstates its certainty.

Stage	Growth Leader Tenure	Sales Leader Tenure	Confidence
Seed	12–18 mo	6–12 mo	Low — inferred
Series A	18–24 mo	7–18 mo	Low — Bravado + anecdotal
Series B	2–3 years	18 mo–2.5 yr	Medium — bridging sources
Series C+	3–4 years	2.5–3.5 yr	Medium — nearing enterprise
Fortune 500	4.2 years	3.5–4 yr	High — Spencer Stuart

These numbers are estimates, and I want to be careful not to overclaim from my own table. But the directional pattern matches what I’ve observed over two decades and across multiple companies: tenure tends to increase with company maturity, and sales leaders tend to churn faster—probably because they’re closer to the revenue number and face consequences first when the system can’t deliver.

What I find harder to explain with a talent argument is the consistency across functions. If this were primarily about wrong hires or wrong stage-fit, you’d expect the growth and sales patterns to diverge—different skills, different failure modes, different timelines. Instead, from the growth side, I kept watching the sales leader next to me live the same story at the same pace. That’s what made me think the problem might be structural.

It’s Not a Talent Problem. It’s a Physics Problem.

Consider what a Seed or Series A company actually looks like from a GTM perspective. Almost nobody knows who you are. You have minimal market presence—no installed base, few case studies, negligible word of mouth. You have very few levers to pull: maybe one or two channels on the growth side, a handful of active deals on the sales side. And the big question—how far away is self-sustaining, repeatable revenue?—is genuinely unanswerable.

Now drop a growth leader and a sales leader into that environment and give them a venture-backed timeline.

The problem isn’t that these people lack skill. It’s that the system is too light to hold a steady trajectory. In physics, applying force to a light object doesn’t produce smooth, directed movement—it produces erratic, disproportionate swings. That’s exactly what early-stage GTM looks like. A campaign that would generate a steady, predictable pipeline at a Series C company produces wildly inconsistent results at Series A—not because the strategy is wrong, but because there isn’t enough mass in the system to dampen the variance. One good quarter looks like genius. One bad quarter looks like incompetence. Both are noise.

Meanwhile, the surface-area problem compounds things. With only one or two channels producing anything, GTM leaders have almost no levers to pull. Less surface area means less control. At a Series C company, if one channel underperforms, you shift investment to three others while you diagnose the problem. At Series A, if your primary channel stalls, you’re grounded. There’s nowhere to redirect. On the sales side, it’s the same dynamic—without inbound momentum, case studies, or market credibility, every deal is a custom effort built from scratch in a market that doesn’t know you exist. There’s no leverage in the system.

And here’s the variable everyone misses: at early stages, nobody knows how far away repeatable revenue actually is. Not the CEO, not the board, not the growth leader, not the head of sales. You can’t calculate the distance when you don’t have enough data to build the model. You can’t pace the effort when you can’t see how far you need to go. All you can know is whether you’re headed in the right direction and building momentum. That uncertainty isn’t a failure of leadership. It’s a feature of the system at that stage.

The Replacement Trap

When growth stalls at an early-stage company, the instinct is to replace the most visible person in the revenue equation. Usually, that’s the head of sales first—they’re closest to the number. When the next sales leader stumbles, the head of growth is also blamed for the quality of the pipeline. Sometimes, both get replaced in the same cycle.

The new leaders inherit a system that’s only marginally heavier. The company has a bit more market presence—the first team’s work didn’t vanish. Some channels have been tested. Some deals have been won or lost, generating data. But the underlying structure hasn’t fundamentally changed. If the system is still too light to hold a trajectory, if the levers are still too few to provide real control, if the distance to repeatable revenue is still unknowable—the new team faces the same constraints. And they face them at the added cost of lost institutional knowledge, reset relationships, broken handoff processes, and depleted morale across both functions.

The first GTM team’s most valuable contribution may have been the data they generated—what messaging resonates, which channels produce, what the real sales cycle looks like, where the market responds, and where it’s silent. That’s the raw material the next phase needs. But companies rarely frame it that way. They frame it as a failed hire. Or two.

As companies mature through funding stages, this dynamic shifts. By Series B, there’s real market presence—the system has gained mass. Multiple channels are producing signals, giving GTM leaders more levers and control. The distance to repeatable revenue becomes measurable. The growth and sales motions start compounding on each other instead of operating in parallel. The system is heavy enough to hold a trajectory, so course corrections get smaller and less existential. Tenure lengthens across both functions—not because the leaders are necessarily more talented, but because the system has become more controllable.

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

Remember the company at the top of this piece? Three sales leaders, two growth leaders, pipeline problem unchanged. If you looked at each of those departures individually, you’d find a plausible explanation for every one. Wrong skills. Bad timing. Misalignment with the CEO. But zoom out and the explanation is simpler: the system was too light to hold a trajectory, too narrow to control, and too early to measure against outcomes it couldn’t yet produce. Every replacement resets the clock without changing the physics.

The next time you’re in a room where someone says, “We need to upgrade the GTM leader,” ask one question first: has the system changed, or are we just changing the person? If the mass, the surface area, and the distance look the same as they did twelve months ago, you already know what’s going to happen.

If the problem is structural, the fix has to be structural too. That means setting expectations and metrics that match the system’s actual physics at each stage—measuring signal and learning velocity at Series A instead of pipeline volume, measuring compounding efficiency at Series B instead of raw growth, and measuring system leverage at Series C instead of just topline revenue.

I’ve mapped out what stage-appropriate GTM metrics actually look like—the specific KPIs, when they become meaningful, and how both GTM leaders and boards can use them to stop the revolving door. That’s the companion piece: What to Measure Instead →

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Nick Talbert is a growth and GTM executive with 20+ years of experience leading growth at B2B SaaS and technology companies, including roles at companies later acquired by Amazon and AOL. He writes about go-to-market strategy at strategnik.com.